I had a strange dream last night.?

Question

I dreamt I was having babies and they were dying. I also woke up feeling like someone was calling my name. It was quite disturbing.
I lost a grown son a year and a half ago and this is the first time this has happened.

Answer 1

I think I can help you with that dream of yours.
You and your son sound like you two had a pretty decent relationship, but there is some guilt built up inside of YOU (yes you). How do I know? He was trying to let you know through the rebirth of still born children that you should forgive yourself for something you think you did or didnt do for him, and kill the unnecessary pains. He was the one trying to call you in your sleep. I dont know what it is that you feel guilty about, but his spirit sees it. And he is letting you know that you did a good job as a mother and that you can forgive yourself. (It is okay to email me for more details) I studied Dream Analysis.

Answer 2

I'm so sorry for your loss, and in a way I don't feel at all qualified to be making guesses. I know about grief, though, and one thing struck me about your question:

In my experience it takes about five years to feel at all as if maybe you're sort of over grief (or at least as over it as you're going to get). The first year is its own thing, and you can be numb (to some degree) for that year and beyond. The numbness that you can get when you first lose someone doesn't just all go away at once. Its a gradual process, and the numbness (mercifully) dies down slowly - very slowly. I've always kind of assumed its Nature's way of keeping us kind of numbed up while dealing with the initial part of the grieving process.

At the end of the first year, the numbness can start to wear away more; but what can happen is as it does you start to really feel the loss (in a way, more sharply than before sometimes), and you start to allow some of the thoughts you may have been putting in the back of your mind to surface. All this can bring up a fresh pain, and with that pain comes back a little more numbness.

I've found that after that initial change that goes on between the first year you're going through loss and the four that are to follow, Years Two, Three, and Four don't necessarily have the same kind of dramatic transition that the pre-anniversary months and the anniversary and months shortly after have. (Even recently on the program about September 11 someone noted that there had been a change in the families as this fifth anniversary came up, so its not just me. I base what I say on my own experience, but others back me up.)

Its still so soon for you, and I would think that right now you could be in the process of allowing some of the thoughts that were too painful to surface a little. Even if you can't do this while you're awake your subconscious could be now allowing you to do it while you're dreaming. I've found that my dreams after a serious loss came in obvious layers, with the surface issues being the subject of the dreams in the beginning, but as each layer of issues was apparently processed by new dreams, the dreams became less and less obvious with regard to what they meant. It became more of a challenge to figure out what emotion or emotional state was behind some of the more bizarre dreams that can occur at the end of process.

Again, respectfully, I only pose my guess about your dream as a guess, but I think if I'm at all close maybe it will help you in some way. I'm wondering if underneath whatever your thoughts are, there's the feeling of the horror of having a baby and having it die. Your emotions - under what your head knows - may not have separated the baby you had and later lost in his adult life. That disturbing feeling that you got from this dream is probably also in your subconscious or "heart" because you have the feeling of having lost your baby whether or not your head knows he was a grown-up.

With thinking you heard someone calling your name, that could be anything from your associating people who have left this world with your son or the dreamed-up babies. (The babies, by the way, could have been your mind's way of confusing the loss of your son, your former baby, and any number of other deaths or losses involving other people. For example, if your main grief is over your son but you were thinking of losing other people your mind could have "labeled" those other people as "your babies').

The voice calling you could have been your own voice trying to call you back to how you were before, it could have been your mind's way of imagining your son calling you or linking the "call your name" thing to the way people say "God called him home" after a death. Maybe somewhere underneath you've got some feeling that being called wouldn't be such a bad thing; or maybe, if that's what the calling you was in the dream, you could be afraid that if people are "called" sometimes seemingly at whim you could be next. Your mind could have even done something like recall the delivery of your son. Maybe a nurse or doctor was calling you for some reason then? It would make sense that if you dreamed you were having babies, you could remember medical staff calling your name.

Back to the babies, you could have heard or seen something recently - someone talking about someone losing a child and having more (there was the 911 coverage about some of the wives going on and marrying again). In the back of your mind you could have taken something the struck you in some way and applied it to your own situation. Also, you could have been thinking about all the babies you may have really had or else, if you only had the one, imagining that you could have had more and wouldn't be left with none. For example, even though your mind knows this thought wouldn't be accurate, you could have the FEELING that when you have babies they die - a simple message your emotions got from life (and although your head knows this isn't always the case; your heart is so aware of the fact that the baby you had died (even if later) it is putting too much emphasis on that message that life sent you.

I don't know how old you are, but there's the chance if you're near menopause or finished with it but thinking about it (or even if you saw something on tv that made you think about how it applies to you) that could have triggered off the kind of dream you had.

You could have seen a bunch of babies in a store (and noticed that there were a lot of babies "out today") or on television or heard about someone who have a fifth kid (for example) or even a litter of kittens or puppies (which made you consider the idea of multiple births versus human's usual single births); and something like this could have been the reason for your dream - except when your mind created the dream it added the thing about dying because that's just there for you.

With all the guesses I've made (whether its loss-related processing your mind is doing or whether its just the willy-nilly week-in-review kind of dream that your mind added on to), I can't help but suspect (based on my own experience) that the disturbing and/or bizarre dream you had could be your minds way of dealing with some way-underneath emotional issue because maybe you're about to complete that particular process (the dreams that can follow loss and that come in layers over, maybe, up to two years following the loss).

You may find you have another bizarre dream or two or three before they stop (if your dream is what I think it could be). Try to figure out what way-down-deep issues you may have avoided over the last year and a half, and if you can figure out what they are and process them in your "daytime mind" you'll be done with this type of dream that I mention.

While, in spite of grief, we can usually keep our "intellectual thoughts" well organized and easily processed, the feelings associated with our emotions are not as neat and clean and easily described. If your mind wants to allow you to bring up those emotions and process them it has to label them or attach images to them because minds (including sleeping and subconscious ones) only deal in images, words, and sounds.

While your dream could have come from something as silly as seeing something on tv or even you making some comment to someone about something, I suspect its a matter of your mind trying to deal with some issues still weighing on your heart. The trouble with grief is there is the big grief, but then there are the zillions of little thoughts and issues that accompany the one, big, main, grief.

While I'm not sure how accurate my guessing has been, I am fairly certain that you don't have to worry about this disconcerting dream you had (even if another couple of bizarre ones show up before your mind is finished processing your emotions). I suspect you're moving past the inital stage of grief and moving onto the next few years of gradual healing. (You can't heal until all the "issues" are resolved, and isn't it amazing how Nature helps us address all the issues so naturally. I suspect the dreams don't come earlier because our minds aren't quite ready for dealing with more than the big stuff at hand. A year or so later, once the big, obvious, stuff has been processed we start to process the less obvious.)

My heart goes out to you. Hope I've offered at least a little something by way of, maybe, things you haven't thought of yet....